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CellSpace images tutorial

April 26, 2012September 28, 2014

CellSpace images tutorial

The Iolite team and Ash Norris from Resonetics have been working on a new way of creating images. We take the spatial information recorded in laser log files and combine that with mass spec data to produce images of composition versus sampling position in the laser cell. This has some great advantages:-images don’t need to be of regular shape;-image scans don’t have to be sequential (so you can measure your reference materials between scans, or several times over the course of collecting an image);-and, you can plot your laser ablation image over mapped images of your sample collected by other means, such as photomicrographs, SEM images etc.

Here’s a tutorial, using an otolith (part of a fish’s auditory system) to illustrate how to create a CellSpace image, and how it can be displayed over another image. You can download the example files from this page (at the bottom) to follow along. And if you’re not familiar with using laser log files, you might want to visit this page first.

And just to illustrate how this approach can save time, here’s a figure of how the image scan lines were arranged (green lines in right-most image) over the otolith (shown without scan lines on left and center). You can see we mostly avoid the epoxy mount, saving time and reducing the amount of gunk put into the mass spec:

Unfortunately the mouse position was not captured very well by the recording software. If you have any questions, feel free to post on the forum.